


Four Hats Maddie Can't Wear Again

by kokiyas



Category: Ever After High
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Millinery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-09 01:44:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5520716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kokiyas/pseuds/kokiyas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And one Cerise can</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four Hats Maddie Can't Wear Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LeaperSonata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeaperSonata/gifts).



1.

Maddie’s, well, mad, but she’s not prone to conspiracy theories. She knows that Raven’s been keeping secrets, ever since Cerise started hanging out with them more, and because she knows it, she also knows she’s not just imagining things, unless she’s only imagining that she knows it. In which case, it could really go either way.

It bothers her a little, but only about half the time.

See, there’s the kind of secret you need for surprise parties and unbirthday presents, and then there’s the kind of secret which leads to disaster and brothers cursed to only speak in Riddlish wandering the halls at night and accidentally convincing the student body that they have a ghost problem, and then there’s a third good-bad kind of secret which starts out with hurt feelings and ends with good intentions or vice versa, and there’s no way of knowing what kind of secret Raven and Cerise are keeping until the telling.

Cedar, when she explains this, gets all cross-eyed-y, and then says, “I don’t know what they’re not telling us,” which as good as confirms that Maddie was right to suspect that something was going on. She’s so happy to be right that she does a celebratory jig, there in the middle of the Modern Fairy Languages corridor until Sienna Shu, the ball monitor, threatens to write them both up for dancing on school property.

“I didn’t do anything!” Cedar protests. “It was all Maddie!” And then she claps her hand over her mouth. “Oops.”

Maddie just laughs and throws herself into a pirouette, spinning all the way down the stairs and out the door while Sienna shouts about detention. She’s laughing so hard she doesn’t even realise that her spinning spun her favourite teacup hat off her head and into Baba Yaga’s prized rhododendrons until she’s halfway to Book End.

Oh, well. Her dad’s been doing some hexciting experiments growing tricornes on the cob lately; he’s sure to have a spare.

 

2.

The first thing that Apple says when Maddie scurries into the Royal Student Council meeting is “Is that a real egg?” which is altogether too philosophical a question to ask someone who’s running late, so Maddie just pats the plate on top of her head, checking that the rest of her hat is still there, and nods.

“…Okay,” says Apple, and scrunches up her nose like _this_. Just in case it’s a new greeting which has replaced ‘hello’ and ‘good morning’, Maddie scrunches up her nose, and wiggles both ears for good measure.

“Okay!”

The hat had seemed like a good idea at the time. Sleep suits, dinner jackets, and Maddie’s pretty sure that Gus and Helga eat their chocolate box belts each night and get new ones for the next day; a breakfast hat isn’t all that different, is it?

It took _hours_ to attach all the bacon flowers just right, too.

“Something smells good,” says Cerise, as she slips into the room and sits down next to Maddie. “Is that black pudding?”

Maddie nods. “Help yourself,” she tells Cerise, and Cerise breaks off some of the sausage and chews while Hopper reads the minutes.

Cerise only has one item to discuss – petitioning the faculty to let human students take Advanced Huffing & Puffing – so she spends most of the council meeting listening to everyone else talk. A lot like Maddie, actually, except that as one of their co-presidents Maddie is supposed to listen and offer suggestions while Cerise just gets to be quiet. Once or twice, Maddie spies her looking at the hat, and at Maddie herself, and exactly when her expression changes from _hungry_ to _friendly_ , Maddie can’t be sure.

 

3.

“I am going to say thank you,” Maddie announces to the rest of the table. Which is really just Raven, Earl Grey and a stack of books, but it feels like the kind of thing which needs to be announced. Possibly even proclaimed.

Raven doesn’t glance up from her thronework. “You’re welcome?”

“Not to you, you Mother Goose,” Maddie says. Although Raven has a point, doesn’t she? They’d all helped save the grove, except if she has to make something for everyone who helped then she’d be stuck wrestling with brims until graduation. And even though the others helped, Cerise’s silly costume had been the jolt of extra-special tip-top tea-riffic kind of madness that Maddie thought she’d never see in Ever After!

“Check it out,” Maddie says, pulling her latest project out of her bag. She’s using a plain old straw bonnet she found tucked away in the back of her closet as the base, just to save time, and she’s already attached one fuzzy furry wolfy shaped ear. “For Cerise! I just need to finish the other ear. I’m thinking if I get some enchanted wire then I can make them wiggle on their own!”

“…Oh.”

Maddie hears that kind of ‘oh’ from Raven a lot. It’s just that normally she’s saying it to Apple, right after Apple tries persuading her to go all Evil Raven, Mistress of Poison and Squishy, Spooky, Slimy Things That Go Bump In The Night. Raven’s never said it to Maddie before.

“You don’t like it?”

“No, I do, I promise,” Raven tells her. She catches her lip between her front teeth and chews it. “I just think Cerise… She’s kind of shy, and I don’t think it would be such a good idea to do something..."

“Mad?”

“Spelltacular,” Raven finishes. “But I bet she’d love a thank you without any furriness?”

The hat ends up back in her closet, at least until the café runs out of tea strainers, and she never does get round to that second ear.

 

4.

“You’re here,” Maddie blurts out. “Wait, you probably already know that, don’t you? Most people usually do. I’m pretty good at knowing whether I’m here or somewhere else, except on Alternate Mondays when we like to change the furniture around.”

Cerise is sitting at a table in the back of the tea shop with her Che-myth-stry book propped open to the chapter on shrinking potions. Customers don’t usually study and the novelty has already attracted Maddie’s dad’s interest. He’s openly staring at Cerise, and all the paintings are trying to read over her shoulder as well.

“That,” Maddie tells them firmly, “Is not very polite.”

Cerise glances behind her, where the pictures are all looking exactly as they should be and definitely not at her. “I… Actually, I was hoping you’d show up. I need to ask you a huge favour. We’ve got the Che-myth-stry hexam next week and I still can’t make a poison antidote without, you know, accidentally poisoning my test subject.”

“A dilemma indeed,” Maddie agrees. “But Che-myth-stry just so happens to be my best subject, so…”

“So can you help me? Please?” Cerise peers up at Maddie with her big pleading brown eyes, and really, it’s not like a little extra studying is gonna hurt Maddie’s grades, is it?

Just, maybe without her dad looking on.

Maddie reaches for Cerise’s hand, going to pull her up to her old bedroom where they can have a little peace and quiet, but Cerise flinches and then looks like she wishes she hadn’t.

Pretending that she didn’t see anything, Maddie just scoops up Cerise’s stuff instead. “My bedroom’s just this way, probably. What day is it again?”

When Cerise finally, _finally_ , has the steps to brewing a love potion memorised, Maddie whoops in delight and throws her arms around Cerise, sending them both toppling off her bed and onto the floor. Cerise’s hood slips down just a bit, and without the shadow it casts over her face, she looks almost relaxed, so pretty that Maddie almost can’t not stop herself from leaning down and kissing her. Cerise doesn’t move for a moment, but then she wraps one hand around the back of Maddie’s neck and pulls her in deeper.

Her hat slipped off her head when they fall. Maddie dimly registers the sound of china cracking but that’s a problem for Maddie-in-the-future to deal with. Maddie-here-and-now is having too much fun to stop.

She goes to push Cerise’s hood right the way down, away from her face. Quick as a flash of something extremely quick, Cerise scrambles away.

“I can’t,” Cerise blurts out. “I can’t, sorry.”

“Can’t kiss?”

“Can kiss. Can’t take my hood off.” Cerise gives one of those short laughs that she thinks make her sound less nervous, like there’s nothing she can do to help it, and Maddie smiles.

“I can work with that,” she thinks, and doesn’t ask why, and doesn’t think about what her fingertips might have brushed against before Cerise could pull away.

 

+1.

It’s an opportunity too good to miss: Cerise is sitting on the bench, lacing up her cleats, while the rest of the team start their stretching and warm-ups and, in the case of Daring, checking his reflection. Maddie tippy-toes her way over, intending to surprise her, but she only gets three steps before Cerise turns around. She’s un-sneak-up-on-able.

“Hey you.”

“Hay is for horses, and horses are wishes,” Maddie says automatically. “I didn’t know you spoke Riddlish! But what are you wishing for? Because unless it’s an un-birthday present, I’ll have to go and get it and then you’ll miss getting your gift.”

Cerise’s smile wriggles around her eyes and the corners of her mouth like it’s too shy to be worn properly. “Maybe I was just wishing to see you.”

“Granted,” Maddie says, and kisses her on the cheek. “Now hurry up and open your present!”

It’s nicely wrapped Ever After style, all shiny paper and shinier ribbon and hardly anything inside to go _sparkle_ or BOOM or start dancing a hornpipe. Maddie nods in approval. “Goodie, it hasn’t unwrapped itself early,” she says, handing it over. “I don’t care how helpful it seems, what’s the point of wrapping paper if it’s not to let you choose when you want to be surprised?”

Cerise squidges her present and very, very carefully shakes it.

“You should choose to be surprised now, by the way,” Maddie whispers helpfully.

“Well, if you insist.” Cerise’s grin gets wider, sharper, and she pulls out the hat, turning it over in her hands.

It’s red, of course, and knitted because wool is tricky to work with but in ways that make sense to Maddie, and a soft leather chin strap so it won’t fall off when Cerise is running, and extra-long ear flaps for reasons that Maddie tries not to wonder about just in case the Narrators are nearby.

It’s nice, Maddie knows – she even showed it to Cedar just to be sure – but if Cerise has a knack for telling when Maddie’s close to sneaking up on her, Maddie’s an expert in the little crease between Cerise’s eyebrows which means she’s feeling worried or guilty or both (which is a Not Very Nice field of expertise to have, apart from how everything about Cerise is Absotively, Posilutely Tea-lightful) and which has appeared right now.

“You didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Well, duh,” Maddie agrees. “If I didn’t have a choice then I wouldn’t have wanted to, so I would never have made you anything half as nice.”

“You made this?”

“Hatter. Mad! Comes with the story.” Her forehead wrinkle is less pronounced but still there, which is hardly fair, and all Maddie wants is to try and kiss it better and then never see it again.

“See, I notice things about you,” says Maddie. “And I like all of them, that’s not the problem, I just think that you wouldn’t like people to notice some of them so then when I catch myself noticing one of those things I have to start thinking real hard about pink elephants instead, but I can’t tell which is which until after I’ve already started noticing—“

“What?”

“—Things?”

Cerise goes all quiet for a moment and then presses her mouth against Maddie’s. There’s a lot more things for Maddie to notice then, like how Cerise’s lips are chapped and how warm and full Maddie’s belly feels, and other pink elephant things she doesn’t really want to be narrated, but this feels much nicer than last time.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me,” Cerise says.

“Kissing you? Actually that’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever done for me, too. We should do it more—“

“It’s a really nice hat.” Cerise takes a deep breath. It feels like someone’s hand needs to be held, and Maddie suspects that it might be hers so she reaches out to Cerise and squeezes her fingers gently. “I should try it on.”

“You don’t have to,” Maddie promises. “I can keep on not noticing all you want, see? Pink elephants! Pink elephants!”

“I don’t mind if you notice.” Cerise looks down at her hands. “I like that part, too.”

Maddie squeezes Cerise’s fingers. “Oh, but before you do- This is most definitely a private conversation here, so there better not be any narration, you hear me?”

Oh! Right, yes, at that moment, over on the other side of the pitch, Blondie was setting up for her mirrorcast of the game. After a few minutes, Blondie boots up her mirror, checks that the team are all in position, makes a note to follow up on Cerise’s new look later – either Red Hood Rebellion, or else Cerise Hood Unveils Fable-lous New Style, depending on how the post-match interview goes – and begins to talk.

And when Cerise turns towards the crowd, her eyes find Maddie’s seat straight away. She smiles big and dangerous and full of teeth, Maddie feels as fluttery and warm as a pot of charmblossom tea, and home doesn't feel so very far away.


End file.
